Google to add malware alert system to Chrome browser

Google is aiming to help stop the spread of malware, saying Thursday it plans to add a malware alert feature to prevent the download of malicious applications. The feature is an offshoot of its already popular Safe Browsing feature, which is a Google-maintained list of malicious sites.

Such functionality has been available as an API for developers for about two years now, and Chrome's anti-malware alert system also leans on this code. There are no restrictions on how this API could be used, so Chrome's competitors could just as easily add a similar feature using the same database. Currently Google is the only one using it, however.

Here's how it works: as a user surfs through the web, the browser will query the Safe Browsing database to see if it is a potentially malicious site. An alert will appear when a user attempts to download an executable from these URLs.

"Safe Browsing has done a lot of good for the web, yet the Internet remains rife with deceptive and harmful content," Google security team member Moheeb Abu Rajab said. "It's easy to find sites hosting free downloads that promise one thing but actually behave quite differently."

Rajab said that initially the functionality will only be available to a "subset of users" who have subscribed to development releases of Chrome. However, Google hopes to put the feature in the next stable consumer release of the browser. This will likely come in Chrome 12, expected to be released either in May or June of this year.

Google's move is not unique: Microsoft added similar functionality to Internet Explorer 9. However Redmond's solution is a bit different: instead of a maintained list, Microsoft has developed an algorithm that attempts to judge whether a download is legitimate or not.

It could be argued that this method could potentially be better as it may detect emerging malware threats faster than a human-maintained list, however at the same time it could run the risk of potentially mislabeling legitimate software as malicious.